Most people who build something world-changing want the world to know about it.
Not Leo Radvinsky.
He never gave a public interview despite being worth $7.8 billion and running a platform that had fundamentally changed the economics of earning money online. He died on Sunday after a long battle with cancer. He was 43.
In 2018, Radvinsky bought OnlyFans for a rumoured $30 million. At the time, it was a struggling startup generating less than $100 million in revenue. Most serious investors wouldn't touch it. The category was stigmatised. No Silicon Valley VC was writing a blog post about disrupting adult entertainment.
Radvinsky didn't care. He'd spent his career understanding how the internet could connect creators directly with the people who wanted to pay them. He'd built MyFreeCams in 2004. He understood this space better than almost anyone.
So he bought it.
And he gave creators 80%. OnlyFans takes 20% of what creators earn. Compare that to YouTube, which takes 45%. In a world where platforms routinely extract as much as they can from the people who create value, Radvinsky built something genuinely designed to work for the people on it.
Then the pandemic hit. Millions of people, performers, fitness trainers, musicians, chefs, and adult entertainers suddenly needed new income. OnlyFans was there. And because creators kept 80%, it actually worked.
By 2023, OnlyFans had paid out $6.6 billion to creators in a single year. By 2024, that number was $5.8 billion, and the platform had 4.6 million creators and 377 million fans. It had more revenue per employee than Nvidia, Apple, Google, and Meta combined.
It can be said easily that OnlyFans is one of the most efficient and creator-friendly businesses ever built by a man who nobody would photograph, and who apparently just wanted to build something that worked.
Radvinsky knew he was sick. In 2024, while fighting cancer, he and his wife announced a $23 million grant program for cancer research. He was fighting it privately and funding the fight publicly.
The future of OnlyFans is now uncertain. His shares sit in a trust. A potential $5.5 billion sale was being explored. What happens next to the platform and the millions of creators who depend on it is an open question.
China just put AI agents inside a billion people's phones.
Tencent launched ClawBot, an OpenClaw AI agent that appears as a regular contact inside WeChat, China's most-used app with 1 billion+ monthly users. You text it and it handles your tasks. Within weeks, Alibaba, Baidu, and Xiaomi all launched competing AI agent products.
Cursor admitted it was secretly built on a Chinese model.
Its new coding model was built on top of Kimi, a model made by Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI. The product was presented as a Cursor innovation. The reveal landed awkwardly given the current geopolitical climate around Chinese AI.
It raises a real question: how much of the AI tooling used by Western companies is quietly running on Chinese foundations?
Amazon has quietly built the chip that's powering all of AI and nobody noticed.
Claude runs on over 1 million Amazon Trainium chips. OpenAI just signed a $50 billion deal to build on them. Apple is testing them. Amazon has 1.4 million Trainium chips deployed and is already building Trainium4.
FAST BREAK
OnlyFans has 42 employees. It generates $1.4 billion in revenue a year. That's $33 million in revenue per employee.
For comparison, Nvidia is $3.6 million, Apple is $2.4 million, and Google is $1.9 million.
A 42-person company out-earns per employee the most valuable companies in history. The "secret" is not technology or a proprietary algorithm. It was one decision: give creators 80%.
The most profitable businesses in the world aren't the most complicated ones. They're the ones who figured out who actually creates the value and paid them.